Quick note about an on-going debate that I find - as a non-native English speaker - rather fascinating and questioning: the whole gif or gif pronunciation debate (with soft or hard G).

Not being bilingual, I obviously searched the sources of pronunciation rules and guidelines in English and it seems that the logical pronunciation should be the 'soft' one, to mirror words such as ginger, or giraffe. But then, what about give, geek, gum or graphic, first word of this acronym? It seems that utilizing the hard G when the letter in question comes prior a vowel is a heritage of the German language - the verb give coming from the German term geben. Fair enough.

The thing is, we are facing here an acronym for which pronunciation rules are not clearly defined (especially as gif stands for Graphic Interchange Format -Graphic using a hard G). But then, one year ago, the creator of the gif format himself (Steve Wilhite, link here) clarified that the correct pronunciation should be with soft G as JIF - without a logical rationale behind it. So while investigating, I noticed users are still confused and the debate still rages. As indeed, Mr Wilhite not being a linguist, his view on the matter is not perceived as valid by a lot of people and the lack of rationale behind his point did not help.

My two-cent: as much as I like the concept of giving, I find giraffes cutter so this made up my mind pretty easily. Besides, the soft pronunciation mirrors my mother language so I think unconsciously I tend to go that route.

When asking my better half (German gentlemen - !) he tends to obviously go with the hard pronunciation - arguing that the term graphic being the first word of the acronym does not leave room for arguing , and he has a point. So I think the debate will continue in our house, and will belong to the set of running jokes between our both countries such as Alsace being borrowed by France to Germany etc (on the latter, I reckon Alsace's gastronomy is too good to be German ;)